The present invention relates to the field of loose leaf binders.
Loose leaf binders have been employed for many years to contain punched paper sheets therein, often having gummed reinforcements which are affixed to the sheets about each punched hole in each sheet. Where a substantial number of sheets are utilized it is somewhat time consuming to apply a gummed reinforcement to each hole in each punched sheet contained within the loose leaf binder. Furthermore, it is often desirable to remove a group of sheets from the loose leaf binder and to keep the group together to form an individual file. In order to do this, the user typically would apply a paper clip to a group of such sheets removed from the loose leaf binder to hold the group together. However, the paper clips can be inadvertently removed and papers could be misplaced. Another approach would be to staple the sheets together. However, upon replacing the group of sheets back into the loose leaf binder the staples would normally have to be removed to enable the sheets to be flipped or turned over within the binder.
It is thus a principal object of the present invention to apply inexpensive binding members to the punched holes within the sheets to bind them together into a group, so that one or more sheets do not become separated from the rest of the group, and at the same time to eliminate the need for the circular, often gummed reinforcements generally applied to the holes in the punched sheets to prevent them from being torn at the sheet edge portions in the ring binder.